My top-drafted players through 100 Underdog drafts
Plus a look at a few of my team constructions
I haven’t done a ton of best ball content in the past, but I’m excited to going forward, as I look into next offseason and the years to come. Those of you who follow my podcasts know that I recently realized that despite living in a state stuck in the Stone Age, I am able to enter Underdog slow drafts from legal jurisdictions just by physically traveling there. And so I set up an account and have made three trips out of state, two of which were driven solely by the desire to just enter a bunch of drafts.
Over the next week or so, I’ll finish up the third batch of those slow drafts, which will give me, if I counted right, 98 completed drafts. One of those drafts is a Mastiff, which is a $1,000 buy-in tournament I wanted to enter for a few reasons, one of which being the advance structure, where 6 teams in every 12-team league advance out of the regular season portion, and then 50% of each pod advances forward in each of Weeks 15 and 16, before a Week 17 final that includes 30 teams.
If those terms don’t make a lot of sense to you, the way Underdog contests work is that for your normal 12-team draft, you’ll compete to advance during the period from Week 1-14. After that, if you advance, you’ll move on with all the teams that advanced from their 12-team leagues, scattered across the larger contest you’re in. Among that pool of advancing teams, you’ll move into randomly assigned pods in each of Week 15 and 16 (assuming you continue to advance), until finally in Week 17 you’ll be pitted against all the teams that advanced from their randomly assigned pods and also reached the final.
So in that period of Weeks 15-17, you start to face off against teams that could have some of the same players as you, because you’re no longer just battling with those teams built in your own draft. And at that point, in most of the contests, you’re going to need some big-time weekly upside to win (or in others finish top two) pods consisting of the best-constructed teams from the regular season.
This is where a focus on correlation and stacking comes in, which anyone who has seen any best ball content has surely noticed. That focus is especially on Week 17 correlation, because if you do find yourself advancing a team in the final, the payout structures are often top-heavy enough to where you’d love your roster to have a DFS element to it with game stacks and bring backs and all of that stuff.
At any rate, each of these contests — and there are tons of them at different price points — has a little bit of a different advance structure. In the Mastiff, because 50% of the field is advancing in each period, it’s the most comparable structure to a typical fantasy draft (i.e. in your normal league, you play the regular season and half the teams make the playoffs, and then in each playoff round half of the teams playing are eliminated). So I’m really looking forward to writing that draft up when it finishes probably by the end of this week.
But today, I wanted to write more generally about the players I’ve taken in the other contests I’ve entered. Before I jump into those, if on the off chance you haven’t signed up for Underdog yet, I do think it’s a fantastic way to get your feet wet for your live drafts — think of it like the modern version of mock drafting. These are real money drafts, but there are fun tournaments starting as low as $5 entry fees, and Underdog will match your first deposit up to $100 if you use the promo code “SIGNALS” so even if you just want to get a few drafts under your belt, they’ll double your number and you can do that very cheaply. If you throw in $100, they’ll throw $100 more into your account and you’ll have $200 to play with; if you only want to throw in $10, they’ll throw in $10 and you’ll have $20, and could do four drafts in “The Puppy,” their $5 contest. The match works at any deposit level, and they have an awesome app and great draft software that makes it all very easy and fun to do.
Alright, let’s get into some of my results. Because I’ve done these drafts in batches, there are a few players where I’m overexposed to someone I really liked drafting for maybe just a couple-week period, like Tyquan Thornton. In my first few drafts, as I got my feet wet, the New England passing game felt like a bit of a cheat code for building in some late-round correlation when I failed to correlate my roster well enough by that point. So Thornton, as well as both Hunter Henry (who I’m excited to have drafted a lot of) and Mike Gesicki (who I’m less so), became easy picks along with Mac Jones, sometimes in the final three rounds of a draft.
It’s stuff like this that doesn’t necessarily carry over to what I would offer as good advice for your own drafts, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t a ton of useful nuggets to be gleaned from the below exposures. So let’s look at it.
My biggest exposures so far
These exposures only count completed drafts, and not all from my most recent set of drafts have completed, so those figures aren’t included.
Quarterback
If you read my initial 2023 draft thoughts from my first trip out of state to enter 30+ drafts, you probably recall I wrote a lot about the viability of late-round QB builds in these Underdog contests. I’ve softened on that, and tried to build through some of the higher-upside QB options earlier in drafts a lot more frequently lately, but I’ve nonetheless wound up really exposed to some of those primary late-round targets.
Here’s something I wrote in that section:
“The opportunity cost point is very important, and dovetails with a few of the additional thoughts I have below. But those early picks are very necessary for the upside you need to build into your teams at each of the other three positions, and giving one of those up in search of QB stability looks to me like the least optimal way to build the highest-scoring roster. Again like the Zero RB discussion, it’s not to say that elite QBs won’t score; it’s to say that there are different ways to get fantasy points and the objective is to score the most points from your whole team, which can be done even if it includes fewer points from QB than you would have totaled with an elite. What’s important is what’s possible, and one of the points I made last summer with the Frankenstein RB stuff was how there is even some good fortune necessary, but that when that aligns you have these superteams, and that’s definitely the goal in massive best ball contests.
This is the thing I think many are missing — they focus solely on this idea they can’t make up the QB points, much like people who reject Zero RB without consideration focus solely on how they can’t make up the points elite RBs can score. What we’re talking about is a completely different way to build the puzzle, and it’s very much possible that a Zero QB combination of late-round options arranges to give you surprisingly strong best ball scoring for the position.”
I still feel pretty strongly about this stuff, but as I said, I’ve softened enough to build some variations with pricier QBs. When you look at the way the elite QBs are scoring — not just hitting 30+ points with regularity but averaging in that range — it does get difficult to envision a late-round trio not getting buried by that, especially when we’re talking about someone like Mac Jones who isn’t mobile and could frankly have a strong season without hitting 30 fantasy points in a game once.
So am I in love with how these exposures have pieced together? No. And this is the position where my exposures are most format-specific, and least indicative of what I might do in a normal draft. But I do really like Kenny Pickett, Sam Howell, and Desmond Ridder as later-round options in any format, especially two-QB or SuperFlex. Other than that note, let’s not dwell on this position too much and instead move on to the fun stuff.